I had a interesting call yesterday. A writer by the name of Kevin Helliker from the WSJ contacted me to talk about garage sales. We discussed several things, including the news about some cities limited garage sales and how that in some cases what folks were doing was basically operating a retail store from their home and how that is basically cheating since they are avoiding getting a business license, zoning laws, sales tax collection and reporting, etc. I told him a little about my site (though apparently not enough!) and about my main competition (gsalr). All in all, a pleasant conversation. I couldn't find my data on the growth of garage sales in the past couple of years, else I would have given him that too.
A few hours after the conversation he sent me the press release about the city of Chesapeake nixing the need for us to get garage sale permits.
Well, I decided to google garage sales wsj and found his article here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203899504577128971266748552.html
Lots of folks couldn't read it when I shared it on facebook because WSJ wants you to subscribe, but I found if you google it yourself you'll generally get a link that lets you read it.
While it was fun to have the site mentioned by name (though not by URL) and be quoted in such a prestigious newspaper, the fact that he mentioned gsalr.com and that you could find look up sales by zip code on that site, then mentioned my site by name with a somewhat frivolous quote about buying a textbook for under a buck and selling it for $75, and didn't mention that one could look up sales on this site... oh well. Better than nothing. The article was picked up all over the place. Too bad there wasn't an actual link to my site in it, that would have been awesome for search engine rankings.
If you can't read the article with the above link, you can also read it on Amazon at: http://www.amazonsellercommunity.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=2775954&tstart=0
- 6286 sales this week!